UK's carbon plans make up for oil and gas splurge

Burn, baby, burn. The UK government has announced that it will fast track measures to allow more oil and gas to be sucked out of the North Sea. But it is not all bad news for the environment: it will also fund the world's first commercial gas carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility to deal with some of the harmful CO2 it pumps out.

On Monday, the Wood review on offshore oil and gas was published, which includes proposals to boost declining production, like a new independent regulator and more cooperation between oil and gas firms. Ian Wood said his measures could make it possible to extract the equivalent of an additional 3 to 4 billion barrels of oil, worth £200 billion to the UK. Prime Minister David Cameron immediately backed the plan.

It seems like an environmental nightmare. Just last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said we need to leave large stores of fossil fuels in the ground in order to have a 66 per cent chance of avoiding a 2 °C temperature rise.

Three options

But the UK's output is small fry on a global scale, says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. The North Sea's 3 to 4 billion barrels of oil is roughly equivalent to between 0.05 and 0.1 per cent of the worldwide carbon budget that would keep global warming below 2 °C.

Far more important is the UK government's other announcement. On Monday, it said it will fund a multi-million pound project to design a carbon capture and storage plant at the Peterhead power station in Scotland. The CO2 given off when oil and gas is burned will be captured and transported to Shell's disused Goldeneye gas field, where it will be pumped back underground.

The world has three options for the fossil fuels that have yet to be dug up, and the carbon emissions they will generate, says Allen. We can burn the fuels and dump the emissions into the atmosphere, leading to far more than 2 °C of global warming; we can impose a carbon tax so huge as to render exploitation uneconomical; or we can use CCS. "I'm rooting for option three," says Allen, "because frankly options one and two sound horrendous."

"Anything the UK can do to promote CCS is far more important than anything the UK does with its own oil and gas reserves," he says, "so more power to the pumps."

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Not so bad if you bury your carbon (Image: Andy Buchanan/PA Wire/Press Association)